Fire

Last night, around 9 pm, we heard the sound of a fire truck. We didn't think much of it, since you hear them more often, although this one did sound a bitter closer than normal. Nolan looked outside, and he could see the reflection of fire in the windows of houses across the street! That made us realize it was a bit closer than usual. We ran outside, and first thought it was one of the houses on our street, but quickly we noticed the huge flames and large amounts of smokes coming from a house at the end of our street, across the road. I have never seen a fire like that; the house was complete engulfed in flames and you could see and hear several small explosions. Fire trucks kept arriving, and it was quite amazing to see how quickly and efficiently they went to work. When the fire spread to the other house, you could hear a common awe among the dozens of people watching the fire. The fire fighters were able to knock the fire down in about 45 minutes, and were able to save most of the second house. Watching last night, we really thought they would knock the first house down; it sure didn't look like any of that would survive. Luckily nobody got hurt, and everybody was able to get out on time. Nevertheless, two families were displaced and lost so much.

The Ottawa Sun newspaper has a story and some dramatic photos, which shows quite well the intensity o the fire.  The Ottawa Citizen article gave it some attention as well, and it was on several newscasts. Which in return turned our street into a huge parking lot for media vehicles.
I just walked by it from my way from work and took this picture with my BlackBerry:

All in all a pretty scary situation, and you realize how quickly things can take a turn, and change your life forever. One our to-do list this weekend: make sure we have a decent inventory of our house... They have not figured out yet what caused the fire.

On a more personal level, Nolan will be a bachelor again this weekend. I have fire duty (how peculiar...) at the PRF this weekend. Luckily we've had quite a bit of rain this weekend, so I won't have to worry too much about actual forest fires, but I will be there to keep an eye on the place, and it's also a great time to catch up on a lot of work without too much interruption. Who else works on the weekend??